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The Bat to Gmail

Yesterday I used Gmail’s imap to import messages from The Bat. I’ve been using The Bat for several years now for business email for our colic business. It has worked well but I really wanted D to be able to check our business account from downstairs or from anywhere else on the web (like when I travel). So, yesterday I decided to try to get the email into Gmail. It worked, but it was a pain. I suspect that I lost a couple hundred messages in all because of unknown errors either from The Bat or Gmail.

It was painful. What I did was create a Gmail account and enable IMAP support. Then I setup that IMAP account inside The Bat. Then I created IMAP folders inside The Bat and copied messages from a folder in our old account in The Bat to this new folder in this new IMAP account in The Bat. Then I waited and watched The Bat struggle to push all these messages to the server. The points of pain were:

Getting the settings correct in The Bat for the new Gmail IMAP account

Doing a folder contents copy for each folder (about 4o of them) from the old account in The Bat to the IMAP account in The Bat

The BAT doesn’t show you anything useful when it is trying to upload these messages to the server. In fact, sometimes it closes the connection window but keeps working. Other times it keeps the connection window open but stops working. So, I had to monitor the progress inside the Gmail folder to see how many messages had arrived.

When it was all done I disabled POP and IMAP access inside Gmail. I changed our old pop account to be a forwarder to push the mail to Gmail. I setup Gmail with our account so we can send mail from Gmail and have it look like it came from the old account.

So far, I’m impressed that Gmail does such a good job at detecting spam and not accidentally considering real email as Spam. So far I’ve had no false positives. Hopefully this works out and we can stay with Gmail from now on for our business email.